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Power Classifications
These are the power classifications used by the United States Federal Department of Metahuman Affairs in the 2050s. Anyone ranked as Class 3 or higher has this indicated on their driver's license (or some other type of primary ID if they don't drive, I guess). Everyone is tested for powers at birth and classified accordingly, but reclassification is possible in the event of any significant change, the most common of which being formerly unpowered children developing powers during puberty. Metahumans with multiple powers are ranked on their most lethal power. * Class 0: Unpowered * Class 1: Unlikely to cause harm (EG: Sean Romero's carpokinesis; Ling Derring's gender swap) * Class 2: Potential to cause minor injury (EG: Rachel Heffron's vine sprouting) * Class 3: Potential to incapacitate (EG: Alice Phylar's mind wipe; Jareth Ragwort's fear manifestations) * Class 4: Potential to kill a single person with one use of their power (EG: Lorelei Cyrus's strength) * Class 5: Potential to kill multiple people with one use of their power (EG: Eddie Yang's lightning strikes) * Class 6: Potential for mass genocide/human extinction with one use of their power (EG: Wes's nigh-unlimited reality warping) A note on classification: Some powers fall under Class 4 or 5 under normal circumstances, but could achieve the single-shot body count of Class 5 or 6, respectively, if things lined up a certain way for them. The policy here is that if a person with that power has little or no ability to call up those circumstances on demand, they should be given the lower classification. * Milo Sharpe has the ability to vaporise chunks of people's bodies by rematerializing inside them. He could technically deal lethal blows to two people at once, but that would require them to be positioned very close together (such as standing next to each other, or on either side of him), which isn't really something he can control and doesn't happen often enough on its own, especially considering that they could dodge if they had any warning. Therefore he's a Class 4 instead of a Class 5. * Ben McGraw has the ability to take two items and combine them into a new item with the properties of both. He could make some sort of doomsday device by combining nuclear bombs or other weapons of mass destruction (this would probably take multiple steps of increasing destructiveness, but still). However, society is designed to make it very difficult for random people to get ahold of weapons of mass destruction whenever they want; the odds of him getting his hands on materials that could be used to make a doomsday device are very low. Therefore he's a Class 5 instead of a Class 6. ---- 'A Few Notes On Class 6 Powers' There are both IC and OOC factors that make it so there are no PCs with a Class 6 ranking. (Wes is more of a well-developed NPC.) In-universe, the DMA is reluctant to give out a ranking of Class 6 unless it's for a power that could obviously be used to kill everyone in the state before you could blink. Powersets that could maybe cause large amounts of doom, but in a subtler or less direct way, generally get filed as Class 5. The second IC factor is that a meta may have a power that's equivalent to a Class 6, but not be known as such to the government; this could happen in any number of ways. Their very existence might be kept a secret (so they wouldn't have an official ranking at all), or they might be on file as having a lower ranking than what they're actually capable of doing. The latter could be achieved by interfering with the power test or tampering with the records. OOCly, Class 6s aren't usually allowed to be PCs. (They shouldn't be protagonists, to put it more transparently. Class 6 antagonists aren't a great idea either.) The reason for this is that if a character who could solve virtually any problem takes an active role in a plot, there isn't going to be a plot for very long, and nobody else will get to do anything. Even if their powers aren't broad enough to solve the whole plot, they'll still monopolise the combat portion if there is one. They're just too goddamn powerful. There are two exceptions to this policy, though even those aren't really recommended. Don't make a Class 6 character if anything else at all will serve your purposes. * The first exception is characters who're Class 6 simply because they have a power with little or no use beyond instant mass murder, rather than being able to kill all of everyone as a by-product of generally being stupidly powerful. A character with a narrow Class 6 power like that would at least avoid the problem of being too powerful for the plot, although they might be unsuitable for TNG for other reasons. (Reasons like how easy it would be to play that for grimdark and angst.) * The second is for stupidly-powerful-in-general Class 6 characters, which we have a couple of. This is allowed because either they absolutely can't use their powers to help with the plot (or at least not in a voluntary and controllable fashion), or they absolutely won't help: they're capable of doing so but nothing can motivate them to actually do it. (The latter is virtually guaranteed to make for a minor character, or an unsympathetic one.) This leaves open the possibility of using their powers to establish or complicate the plot. (I mean, that's pretty much the entire reason Wes exists.) But there has to be something stopping them from solving the other characters' problems, and this barrier cannot be easy to remove. And please, don't take this warning as a challenge. I just said why Class 6s are a huge pain in the ass to manage OOCly; the other authors are very likely to be wary at best and outright hostile at worst for those same reasons, and because of the story-breaking tendencies of Class 6 superpowers your character will not be allowed to play an active role (as opposed to "plot device that talks") in any story arcs unless you find one like the Nightmare Hour that forces all PCs to check their powers at the door.